Sam Darnold: There’s no excuse for how I played

There wasn’t much way to make Sunday’s performance against the Dolphins look like anything but a disaster, so Jets quarterback Sam Darnold didn’t bother.

Darnold was 21-of-39 for 229 yards and four interceptions, one of which was returned for the only touchdown on a day when the Jets defense held the Dolphins to six points in a 13-16 loss. The rookie didn’t get too much help from center Spencer Long‘s erratic shotgun snaps or some iffy pass catching efforts, but those things couldn’t explain all the other things that went wrong for Darnold.

“There’s no excuse for how I played out there,” Darnold said, via NJ.com. “I’ve got to play better. … I’ve just got to be sharper. I have to have a better plan once I get to the line of scrimmage. I’ve just got to know exactly where to go with the ball, and if one or two is not there [in the read progression], go to three. I’ve just got to have a better plan.”

It’s the third rough outing in a row for Darnold, who now has 11 touchdowns and 14 interceptions on the season. That’s led to three straight losses and increasing frustrations for the Jets.

19 responses to “Sam Darnold: There’s no excuse for how I played”

To be fair there’s sort of an excuse. It’s hard to play well when your senses are constantly overwhelmed by the stank and despair of 50 years of fun filled football futility.
J-E-S-T-S jests, jests…jests

The kid played absolutely horrible, but that entire offense has looked awful for the past couple of weeks, everyone looks like they’re blanketed by defenders and the play calling isn’t helping either,chalk up another second half with no adjustments by Boles and his staff smh.

Meh. He looked bad out there, but he has no mentorship coming from that coaching staff, and the offense stinks generally. I can understand throwing some interceptions when you’re trying to force the ball and make something happen. When your best offensive option is Quincy Enunwa, you need to take some risks to score points.

From what I’ve seen, he can be a very good pro QB. He’s not a sure thing, but he doesn’t strike me the way some young QB’s (thinking Winston, Weeden, Vince Young, Manziel, Locker) do, where you can tell pretty quickly that they just don’t have it.

Quite often teams picking up a QB early are bad teams so these young guys aren’t going into great situations. You have to be something special to buck the trend. Most of these guys need to be sitting for a year or two. But the media and us fans want the rookie out there as soon as the vet makes a mistake.